Obama doesn’t want to take responsibility for NSA reform?

United States President Barack Obama is expected on Friday to announce changes to some of the surveillance programs operated by the US National Security Agency, but insiders say he’ll task Congress with tackling the NSA’s more contentious activities.

A group of five experts hand-picked by the commander-in-chief
said in a report
released last month that they recommend the White House consider
implementing no fewer than 46 changes that would alter the way
the NSA and the American intelligence apparatus at-large conducts
surveillance. On Friday the president will finally weigh in on
that panel’s findings, but preliminary reports suggest he’ll heed
but a fraction of those few dozen suggestions and ask members of
the House and Senate to mull over the remaining recommendations,
leaving reform largely in the hands of a divided Congress.

Pres. Obama will likely announce new limits on the NSA program
that lets the government collect in bulk the
telephone metadata records pertaining to millions of
Americans daily, the Washington Post
reported on Wednesday, but will rely on Congress to, as the
paper puts it, “determine the program’s future.”

Mike Morell, a former deputy of the US Central Intelligence
Agency and a member of the president’s review group, testified
before the Senate on Tuesday that the metadata collection program
“has not played a significant role in preventing any
terrorist attacks to this point,” but endorsed it
nonetheless.

“It is absolutely true,” Morell said, “that [the
program] has not by itself disrupted [or] prevented terrorist
attacks in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it’s not
important going forward.”

“Many of us have never suffered a fire in our homes but many
of us have homeowners insurance,” he added.

When Morell and his colleague published their findings last
month, the group wrote, "In our view, the current storage by
the government of bulk metadata creates potential risk to public
trust, personal privacy and civil liberty.” To remediate
these issues, the panel said, the government should consider a
number of possible alternatives, such as letting
telecommunication companies hold the data and instilling a public
advocate to investigate federal requests for private information.

The Post now reports that the president will recommend some
limitations to that program, but put the fate of most operations
in the hands of Congress.

“Two people familiar with the deliberations said the
president is likely to emphasize that the NSA’s bulk collection
of phone data — which includes numbers dialed but not call
content — is not something that the government should rely on
except in limited circumstances related to the agency’s
mission,” the Post reported.

According to the
New York Times, however, other insiders say the president is
only satisfied with endorsing certain limits on that NSA
operation. The Times wrote on Tuesday that the president will
advocate for increased scrutiny inside the bulk metadata program,
but will not ask private companies to hold those records.

Ultimately, the Post report suggests, the White House will call
on Congress to debate any changes to the provision that currently
puts that metadata easily into the hands of the government’s
intelligence gatherers. According to the paper, the US House of
Representatives will likely have enough votes next year when the
program is up for renewal to shut it down, should they chose to.

An effort in the House waged last year by Rep. Justin Amash
(R-Michigan) came just a dozen votes of shy of stripping the
NSA of its spy powers. NSA
documents obtained by Edward Snowden and shared with
the reporters he’s chosen to work with, however, have been
continuously released during the last seven-months, and as a
result have shined a spotlight on previously top-secret spy
operations that have since caused outrage around the world and
increased anti-NSA sentiment across the board.

Additional disclosures made by Mr. Snowden since the leaks began
last June have shown that the NSA collects intelligence just not
on Americans, but also spies on foreign allies and works towards
compromising
commercial available security software to more easily eavesdrop
on electronic communications.

Both the Times and the Post reported this week that the president
will also likely endorse changes to the NSA programs that
currently target foreign persons for surveillance, but some say
any alterations could severely hinder intelligence gathering
operations.

“The entire mission of our intelligence agencies is to
collect foreign intelligence without regard to the civil
liberties of the targets against whom we’re collecting,” one
former senior intelligence official told the Post this week.
“It’s a dangerous road to go down to start worrying about the
civil liberties and constitutional rights of people like the
president of Pakistan or the senior military commander in
Libya.”

In 2007 while serving as a US senator for Illinois, Mr. Obama
co-sponsored a bill that would have required government officials
to prove with “specific and articulable facts” that it
required records related to foreign persons. That measure
ultimately died on the Hill.